


Nameless

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Adrenaline, Dead Characters are Dead, Grieving, Happy Ending, Healing, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Questionably Healthy Sex, Reckless Behavior, Smoking, Suicide Attempt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, aunt may - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 11:51:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18260717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Sometimes he wakes up and his body moves about like it’s supposed to but his head is trapped behind dust-built walls and all he can feel is this sad, nameless thing crawling down his throat.So he cracks open a window and sits on a metal ledge too small for him and he hangs forward and inhales the closest thing to high he can these days. Gold rains down over a city that’s never fully recovers, won’t for a time much longer than he or Winter.





	Nameless

Peter doesn’t know how else to explain the feeling, except to tell the doctor it’s the Big Nameless Sad and it has haunted him since they put his parents to rest in wooden coffins. 

The doctor wants to know more about the Big Nameless Sad, and Peter shifts in a mustard leather chair, digs his fingers into his palms. “It didn’t used to be Big,” he says quiet. 

The doctor clicks his pen, tilts his head, and Peter doesn’t want to tell him, but it spills out anyway. “It was just Nameless at first,” he says, eyes darting between the splotchy water colors along the wall. “I was little, you know? Real little. And something was missing. Someone. I kept… Aunt May says I asked about them. My parents. Every day. Until one day I just…” he cracks a knuckle. 

“Until you didn’t?” The doctor asks, quiet and soothing. 

Peter shrugs and plucks one of the strings to his hood, pops it between his lips. 

The doctor sighs and carefully tucks his pen into the spirals of the notebook. “Peter, do you know why you’re here?”

Peter narrows his eyes. He’s starting to sweat, just a little at the base of his spine, and his skin crawls. “‘Cause I fell,” he grunts, jaw clenched and eyes shut. 

“You didn’t fall, Peter,” the doctor says with the same soft pity everyone has. 

He can feel the anger blistering in his chest, clawing behind his teeth. “Were you up there? Did you see exactly what happened?” He leans forward, fingers trying to split the leather, uncaring of the bloody nail bed scabs he’s reopening. 

The doctor doesn’t seem frightened. “He was, Peter. The one who brought you in.”

And there is the truth Peter has fought. But he’s never been one to back down. “Winter is damaged. Sometimes he gets confused about what he sees.”

The doctor closes his notebook and gives Peter a sharp look. “You should be kinder to those who care.” 

—

He used to just call it the Nameless. The strange feeling that wrapped around his wrist, his ankles, tied him to the earth even as he felt like floating. The Nameless made him reckless, made him lean too far over the edge, jump from just a little too high. Pick a fight with a guy just a little too big. 

Any thing to feel real, solid. More than empty. 

And then he had to acknowledge the Nameless wasn’t entirely unknown. More of a Nameless Sad. A grief everyone felt at some point, but Peter had to face as they lowered Uncle Ben into a wooden sleep chest. 

Aunt May faced the Nameless Sad with determination and spunk and willpower. She faced it head on with red, puffy eyes and hands that never really stopped shaking. 

Peter fought it with latex suits and green smoke and adrenaline rushes that would’ve broken ordinary boys. 

Tony, Tony undersold the Nameless Sad. He presented it as a party with booze and bodies and pills. Peter got the pills. Even the booze sometimes, when the smoke and powder didn’t kick the Real away. 

But he never got the bodies. Tony’s Nameless Sad was touch deprived and desperate. Peter’s wanted…

To fly? To, to avenge? 

He tries to tell the doctor but the truth is, he doesn’t know. Except that when he was swinging between metal and glass, it was the closes the Real felt to being Real. Being good, safe,  _ worth  _ existing in. 

And then the world ended. Then he needed. 

He watch the Nameless Sad get Big in Tony’s eyes. Felt his skin, like a million ants fleeing and then nothing, dissolve away. 

He remembers begging Tony not to let him go. Or he thinks that’s what he asks. 

And then the world ended and then it came back.

—

The world exploded, imploded, and then shuddered. All wrong, off its axis. People gone, people present, no one sure who was real and what was alive. 

Aunt May wept when Peter stumbled through her door. She wept the Big Nameless Sad tears.

Her breath smelt wrong. Her eyes stayed red and puffy. 

Her hands shake so bad Peter gets her tested for a million things. 

But she makes it through. Smiling and shaking and solid. 

She tells Peter to make friends and he doesn’t know how to tell her this place isn’t real. This place is… 

So he leaves during normal hours, when May tries to pay the bills and dinner mostly stays burnt. He says he’s going to Ned’s, and May doesn’t even check the registries to see if that’s possible. 

Peter doesn’t check either. 

Mostly Peter swings. Goes up to the tallest thing he can find and slings himself out as far as he can. He rarely slips, but the  _ rush _ when he does? 

God, his heart so loud in his ears, wind cutting beneath his suit, his breath sucked from his chest. It aches, heavy and tangible. 

Winter caught him one when he fell. Entirely on accident, but there he was, dead eyed and confused holding a spider who couldn’t breath. 

Winter never caught him before, when he watched Peter fall. When Bucky’s eyes screamed and begged but didn’t interfere. 

He didn’t lecture him or walk him home. He handed Peter a plum and lead him to a hovel that was actually quite nice inside, and he let Peter sleep.

When Peter wakes up, he’s alone. But there’s a bag of juicy, out of season fruits, a key, and a number scrawled in the bag. 

He walks home in the cold, and it’s not until he’s scraping what might be eggs into the trash that he realizes, the Big Nameless Sad was dormant, just for a moment. 

—

Peter thinks Winter is lonely. So much of the world came back, crooked and jagged, but back. Even more didn’t. 

People dead because of the Snap, but not by it. People dead after the Snap. People dead of the Snap, in the Snap. 

So, so,  _ so many  _ more dead to undo the Snap. 

It’s kind of nice, sometimes, that the world doesn’t need heroes anymore. 

Good because there’s aren’t many left. Nice, until one thinks about  _ why. _

Winter lost everyone. He only really had one to lose, but he lost that, and all the fringe. 

And Peter feels gross and wrong, clammy, sticky, too cold when he thinks about how much he didn’t lose. 

Because Winter is a survivor. He makes it. Quiet, determined, almost bullheaded. 

More sad, Peter thinks, Winter is used to being alone. Losing everyone. Winter killed Bucky, anyway. 

Every day he kills him.

Peter should be. A survivor.

Just like he should be used to the rollercoaster Empty-High-Empty-Sad- _ Rush _ . 

But Winter, always alone, is ever present. Peter sees him when he scales up scrapers and towers and hotels. 

Lurking, sucking impossible juice from his flesh and bone fingers. 

His metal arm hangs, uselessly. 

Peter should fix that.

—

Winter grabs Peter by his scruff, straight off the teetering beam. His grip shakes though, human muscle straining under pressure, angle, weight. 

He looks at Peter blank faced, save for the confusion behind dark eyes. 

Peter knows that confusion. The impulse to  _ save _ , without knowing why. 

Peter sighs, taps rusted metal. “I can try,” he begins. 

Winter throws him,  _ hard _ , onto the closest rooftop and Peter’s banged up suit gives beneath his left elbow. He scowls at the bloody, mangled skin, and then at the soldier before him. 

Winter cocks his head, greasy hair moving like wet curtains. “Try? Do.”

Peter scowls but he picks himself up, swaying just a moment when he sees how high he is, and then jumps. 

He falls, directionless and free as long as he can, only slinging a web when he can make out the first face. 

Winter knows where the tower is. He’ll find his own way. 

—

Aunt May wants him to see someone. She tells him this when he comes home with a split lip, swollen eye, and purple jaw. 

“Wasn’t a fight,” he mutters. 

She hands him frozen peas and takes the macaroni off the stove before it burns, for once. 

“Was trying to fix it,” he says, tired. 

There’s oil beneath his nails, rust in the lines. He can’t- for all his brains, he’s not Shuri, and he’s not Tony and he doesn’t understand their methods always. And he can’t ask Shuri anymore. Not after everything. 

Winter says he’s stupid not too. But then he doesn’t push the issue, even when the bionic arm literally explodes in their faces, and Peter thinks, maybe Winter gets it more than he says. 

Aunt May doesn’t. She wants Peter “here” she says. Wherever here is. 

“You sit in that chair, answering my questions, but you don’t tell me anything Pete. You’re, you’re…” her lip wobbles. “It’s like it’s not you who came back. You’re just… what’s it called, like a shadow. An afterimage.”

Peter doesn’t think that’s quite what she means, but he also doesn’t have the energy to argue. 

“He deserves better,” May says as she grabs their dishes. Her eyes are less red than Peter expected, but her hands tremble the same. 

He’s not sure who he is, how she could even know about Winter. 

Aunt May always seems to know more than she should.

“Call him,” she says, sliding a card to Peter. 

He pockets it with zero intentions to do so. 

—

Winter calls for him. 

Peter fell through the glass. Slipped. Jumped. Whatever. He lands with a  _ crack-pop-thud  _ at Winter’s feet, unable to breath. 

Winter flexes his working fingers and stares at the blood leaking from Peter’s face. He doesn’t help him up, instead he snatches the card from Peter’s pocket and leaves the room. 

Peter will heal, slow and pained, but he’ll heal, and they both know it. 

By the time he returns, Peter’s back has mostly straightened and his face is still puffy but not bleeding. He’s bent over the metal wrist though, a look of solid determination that makes Bucky swoon a little, because he’s seen that on so many faces, but not for a long time. 

Peter’s biting his lip, sweat catches in his curls, and sparks fly, and Bucky stands, one armed and exhausted, letting Winter rest. 

Peter works too many hours in a row, sun dipping and bumping in the window. Bucky wars with Winter on if disturbing him is the right course, but there’s a flush in his cheeks and a spark in his eyes and his feet are solid on the ground.

He isn’t shaking, isn’t chasing an unattainable high, isn’t leaping too far, too fast, too sudden. 

—

The sun settles just above the trees when Peter finally huffs, excited and exhausted. He turns, slumped against the metal work bench, and his eyes are dark bruises gleaming. 

“Try it,” he says, voice cracking from disuse. Winter tosses him a water bottle and some crackers and waits until he’s downed the whole thing before studying the arm. 

It’s- it’s dented. A mismatch quilt of borrowed and stolen pieces, haphazardly welded together. But there’s a beauty to the jagged edges, to the copper-silver-bronze patchwork. 

It takes him a while to figure out how to attach it, and Peter frowns, making notes. When he gets it on, finally, he gasp, drops to the floor

Peter is there in seconds, wavering above him, hands trying to find the problem. 

Winter looks at him, a little sick, “It feels almost real.”

Peter’s lips take a sharp curves “Is that, was that not the goal?”

Winter shakes his head. He pulls Peter down with him, holds him close. The spider is too skinny in his arms. Sharp and cold and feathery, but he clings to Winter like he’s never been hugged before. Winter doesn’t exactly cry into his brown curls, but they stay there until their knees ache and their backs are stiff and Peter follows him to the place he calls home. 

Winters not sure how real it is, the heat from Peter’s palm radiating between his metal fingers. 

Who cares about real these days anyway?

—

Peter spends two glorious, peaceful days in Winter’s bed. 

They don’t do much. Peter baths him, washes his hair and trims it, and teaches him how to clean the arm. 

Winter massages the knots in Peter’s back, and procures green smoke they breath in together 

“A blanket,” Peter tells him. “Slippery, a little slick, heavy. That’s what it’s like.”

“Starts right at the top of your head,” Winter responds. “Slinks over your skin like a good itch, nails of a lover.”  They don’t blush.

Peter shifts, pushes Winter until he’s on his back and straddles him. “Like,” he hesitates, “this?” He carefully drags a single nail down from Winter’s ear, over his jaw, across his Adam’s Apple. 

Bucky swallows. 

Peter grins, small and absent, eyes glossy. 

Winter shakes his head. “Not hard enough, gets lost.”

Peter tilts his head and Winter leans up just enough to push, to strip his own shirt off, then Peter’s. Peter hooks his fingers over Winter’s shoulders, drags them down his torso. Not hard enough to bruise or bleed; just enough for the angry red lashes. 

Peter leans down and mouths at his jaw, licks at the stubble. “Who is punished in this moment?” 

Bucky turns to him with hollow eyes. “Aren’t we all?”

It’s fast, messy, timeless after that. Their pants can’t be salvaged. Peter’s got the strength to wrestle Winter to the bed, to pin him with his knees, but Winter has slept some these last few days, and it doesn’t take much to shove Peter face first into the pillow. He takes his time, licking him open. Spider is sweaty, musky, not his favorite flavors, but he arches and cries out and it’s  _ music _ .

So he takes his time, works until his jaw aches and his tongue is cotton.  

Could be the high, could be the time. He doesn’t finger Peter open, they’re both too impatient, too ready. 

One slow breech, a swift plunge and he sinks into a heat he’d long forgotten.

Peter tense beneath him, knuckles white against the dark sheets and Bucky hesitates for a moment.

Then Peter turns with dark eyes and a snarl, “ _ move _ ,” jerks as much as he can. 

Winter isn’t kind after that. Takes his pleasure, hard and slow, makes it last as long as he can bear. 

He doesn’t let Peter come until he has, until Peter’s ass leaks and his belly swells. Then he lays him on his back and licks at his cock, purple and weeping and desperate, ghost his breath over it.

When he finally swallows it down, it’s no surprise Peter’s whole body jerks.  Winter makes it a point to stare at the eyes screwed shut, leaking tears down his cheek. 

The high last until the orgasms fade. Until Winter says, “Tomorrow at 3.”

Peter doesn’t argue, but he yanks himself from the damp sheets and curls up on the couch, naked and angry. 

—

He doesn’t forgive Winter, but he goes. The doctor asks him questions. “Do you sleep?” “Never have.” “Do you enjoy things?” “Getting high, flying.” “Do you have friends?” Silence. 

Peter tries to cooperate. 

“How do you spend your days?”

“Dunno.”

“How do you pay your bills then?”

Peter stiffens, thinks of Aunt May in a kitchen where the fridge leaks. Where she doesn’t touch the money left to her, puts it into an account for Peter like he’s not already loaded. “Trust fund.”

“It’ll run out eventually. Do you think you should prepare for it?” The doctor doesn’t even look at him. 

“It won’t,” Peter says, and he walks out the door. 

He’s not surprised to see Winter slouched against the stone steps. And he’s still angry at being played, but he accepts the hand, helps him up, doesn’t let go. 

“Not this one, please,” he says. It’s quiet, the only apology either of them will get. 

—

Peter hates Winter’s home, if only because it  _ looks  _ like a fugitive. Winter hates the tower for more reasons than either of them can grapple with. 

The Big Nameless Sad curls around Peter like a molded cloak, but he holds it tight against his neck when they trudge into Aunt May’s home, angry and cold and starving. 

She serves them cold stew and warm toast and tries to keep her worries to herself. 

She’s almost stopped shaking. 

Peter should be happy instead of bitter. 

Winter grips his hand, just too tight under the table, and charms May.

—

He goes to several doctors and he walks out of them. 

They don’t- he’s a checklist to them. A list of symptoms to treat. 

They don’t care about him, only about Better, and their versions of it. 

Winter follows him. Watches him climb too high. 

Fall.

Again and again and again until he’s out of webs and Winter has to scramble to catch him. 

They both slam into the concrete and Bucky huffs, rolls over and tries not to vomit. 

Peter grimaces, reaches  out to apologize, but Winter slaps his hand away. “I won’t watch you kill yourself.” 

They both ignore the lie as Peter cups his face, presses their foreheads together. “I won’t.”

—

Bucky drags him through the doors of the hospital. May is already there, face stern ordering the nurses around like she owns this place. 

Peter shakes in Bucky’s arms. He’s not weeping, teeth gritted against the tears. There’s vomit on his shirt. “I don’t,” Peter gasp. 

Winter shushes him, harsh and angry, holds him too tight. “I told you-“ 

They steal him from Winter’s arms. Whisk him away behind swinging metal doors. Peter makes the mistake of looking back, once, and he’s never really seen the big Nameless Sad before. Not this way. 

He saw it in Tony, but that memory is broken and dusty, Peter having already begun fading by the time he looked. 

Bucky is there, and Winter is there. Two faces on the same broken man, angry and hurt and so fucking afraid Peter wants to vomit again. Mostly through, there is the numbness. The empty eyes and abstract glance. 

He’s lost him. Them.  _ Him _ .

—

They fix his body. 

And then they tell him they’ll fix his mind. And Peter laughs. But the room is glass and the furniture unmovable and the sheets sewn down. 

But the doctor, the doctor is kind. Peter likes him. He doesn’t care about symptoms or pills. 

He lets Peter sit in silence sometimes. He asks about the Gone. The ones no one talks about. Not really. 

“I love him.”

“Tony?” 

Peter picks at a bloody nail bed. It’s the last scab he can’t let go. “I loved him. And he loved me. But it wasn’t,” he pauses. 

The doctor tucks his pen in his pad and closes it. “Another rabbit hole, I think.”

Peter grins, faintest uptick of his lips. “I loved him and he loved me, but not enough. We never crossed the lines because we knew it wasn’t enough.”

“You didn’t love each other past society,” the doctor clarifies. 

Peter nods. “I love Winter.”

“Beyond society?”

Peter cocks his head, picks until the blood drips onto his knee and he has to take the doctor’s tissue. “It’s hard to tell.”

“Why?” 

And it’s such a weird question. Peter should know the answer, but he can’t wrap himself around it. 

“Tony died to save me. And I broke. The Big Nameless Sad sits between my knees and weighs me down and I can’t-“ he sucks in a breath, but the doctor lets him continue. “I loved Tony, but not enough, and it still broke everything in me.”

“And now you wonder what you would do if Bucky died.” The doctor says it, doesn’t ask it. Instead he asks, “Does it matter?” 

And Peter thinks. Thinks of the moment at the top of Stark Tower. When he got confused. When the dust kicked up and his phone was dead and he couldn’t find Winter, didn’t care where May was. 

He was dying, again. Alone. He was dying and the Big Nameless Sad was screaming at him, demanding he name it. Winter was gone. Everything, Peter remembers scrambling for green smoke. For a cigarette. For anything to shut him down. 

Screaming for Bucky. For Winter.  _ Gone, gone, gone _ . He’d tried before to save everyone. And then he just tried to save Aunt May.  And then Winter caught up to him and Peter remembered another existence, caught in a world that felt like the Big Nameless Sad. 

Winter had been there. Guiding him. Protecting him. 

Holding him. 

The desperation to survive, to win, to keep each other. 

He was standing on the edge of Tony Stark’s tower, thinking about a man he’d loved, but not enough, who died to save him. Standing there screaming for a man with one face and two names, who he loved so much it tethered him to the Real, chased the Sad away.

He couldn’t find him, couldn’t feel him.  

So he’d…

He’d fallen. Stepped. Flown. 

Jumped. 

—

Most of the doctors want him to name the Big Nameless Sad. To give a face and a voice to the monster that sits in his back and sucks from his chest. 

But he’s had this monster since his parents went to bed in wooden cradles. Since his uncle slept beneath a stone. Since he loved a man not enough, turned to dust, and found out just how much that man loved him. 

He can’t- it’s a part of him. And maybe he’s supposed to be stronger, better. Maybe he’s meant to fight like Aunt May, red eyed and trembling hands, but smiling.

He can’t. 

Winter doesn’t ask him too. Bucky looks the other way. 

The doctor in the hospital gives him a number they all know he won’t call. 

“You were afraid to love Tony Stark completely. And you’re afraid to lose Bucky Barnes,” the doctor tells him. The words are weighted, important, make his stomach churn. “When you leave, Peter, abandon this world. Thing about your demons, and how they’ll find someone knew to feed on.”

He shakes Peter’s hand and releases him into Winter’s arms. 

—

Peter says, “No more green smoke,” and Winter flushes what they have.

Peter picks up a dirty habit, menthol cigarettes in shiny teal wrapping, and Winter hates the smell, the taste, but they sit on the roof together as Peter screams his way through an entire pack.

The sun burns over a broken skyline, and Peter’s face glows in the ash. Winter hovers, afraid of the edge not for himself, but for the spider barely holding on.

Peter smiles at him. Pats the stone. Bucky sinks beside him, leans metal against cotton. He plucks the butt from between Peter’s lips, inhales the last of the nicotine and flicks it. 

They watch the golden light fade.

“Might’ve hit someone,” Peter says quiet. 

Winter shrugs, wraps his arm around Peter and pulls them backwards, onto the stone of the roof. 

Their new home is nice. A forgotten room at the top of an old building. Winter likes the claw-footed tub. May likes the floor below they convinced her to move into.

Peter likes how high it is. All the glass walls. 

He’s not allowed to smoke in the bedroom. That’s Winter’s one rule. 

But sometimes….

Sometimes he wakes up and his body moves about like it’s supposed to but his head is trapped behind dust-built walls and all he can feel is this sad, nameless thing crawling down his throat.

So he cracks open a window and sits on a metal ledge too small for him and he hangs forward and inhales the closest thing to high he can these days. Gold rains down over a city that’s never fully recovers, won’t for a time much longer than he or Winter. 

Seconds. Thats how long he allows himself to be on Titan in those moments, watching his skin shimmer, darken, splinter, fade.

A single heartbeat, and he sees Tony’s eyes.

Winter wakes up, pads across the hardwood floor and lays a metal hand on Peter’s shoulder. Peter kisses the wrist, pleased to see him shudder, and studies an arm that’s almost human. 

It took years. 

“You don’t have to leave it on,” Peter whispers, fingers ghosting over the place where metal and flesh kiss.

Winter shrugs, gently guides Peter away from the window and flicks the nicotine stick over the edge. 

He closes it.

“You don’t need to fall,” Winter says. 

But he pushes Peter against the bed, watches him fall. Bounce.  _ Settle _ .

They move slower these days, tasting each other. Teeth to shoulder, lips to navel, nails to chest, to thighs to the little tattoo inside of the hips. It’s hard to tell who takes who apart, when Peter wraps his legs around Winter, ankles digging into the backs of his thighs. 

Hard to tell who is in control when Bucky moves in long, deep thrust, doesn’t ever really let Peter adjust to the rhythm.

A moment, right before Peter comes, when his whole body is  _ present _ and his face screwed in pleasure. A moment right after Winter’s fallen asleep, when he and Bucky are one, happy and home. 

Nothing big, nothing sad, but a million nameless things all the same. 

Life, Peter sometimes reminds himself, fingers tight in Winter’s dark braid. 

Love, Winter thinks as he swallows his spider down. 

Nameless, they agree, everything that keeps their hearts beating. 


End file.
